Joe Scarborough, long-time staunch conservative Republican and host of the talk show on MSNBC, “Morning Joeâ€, opened his program yesterday by stating that for years he has defended the NRA and the integrity of the Second Amendment. Scarborough stated:I am a conservative Republican who received the NRA’s highest ratings over 4 terms in Congress. I saw the debate over guns as a powerful, symbolic struggle between individual rights and government control. In the years after Waco and Ruby Ridge, the symbolism of that debate seemed even more powerful to my colleagues and me.
However,he now admits that he was wrong. Scarborough, like so many of us,has been deeply affected and irreverently changed by the tragedy at Shady Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut
On a personal note, I was reared in a home where guns were a normal and accepted part of life....not handguns but rifles and shotguns. My brothers and I knew from a young age that guns were weapons of mass destruction, and that we never touched them. Sadly, that mentality no longer exists. carborough expounded on that also:
The violence we see spreading from shopping malls in Oregon, to movie theaters in Colorado, to college campuses in Virginia, to elementary schools in Connecticut, is being spawned by the toxic brew of a violent pop culture, a growing mental health crisis and the proliferation of combat-styled guns.
Scarborough continued by stating that though entrenched special interests will try to muddy the issue the answer is no longer a mystery to common-sense Americans. He added.
And blessedly, there are more common-sense Americans than there are special interests, even if it doesn’t always seem that way. Good luck to the gun lobbyist or Hollywood lawyer who tries to blunt the righteous anger of ten million parents by hiding behind a twisted reading of our Bill of Rights.
As I said in a previous post, we have this moment, common-sense Americans, parents and grandparents, to make a difference for the future of our progeny.
As Scarborough stated:
But let this be out true landmark; let Newtown be the hour after which, in the words of the New Testament, we did all we could to make all things new